Scaling the School Spirit: Growing The Lycée Community

One of bak’s USPs is its ability to work across multiple languages and cultures, hopping back and forth from one tongue to the next with practiced facility (check out our work pages for examples). Some of our biggest successes have been with bilingual campaigns and we were proud to be given the opportunity to work with the executive team at one of French education’s most prestigious institutions, The Lycée  Charles De Gaulle de Londres, on a revamp of their branding and communication strategy in French and English.

Our main task was to give an exciting and vibrant refresh to the image of a venerable educational institution. One much more in tune with the current contemporary spirit of the school, located in the heart of West Central London.  We built our approach around a single insiprationl slogan that we would take The Lycée through the year, Ç’est Ça The Lycée. These words ecapsulate what we were trying to do with the brand refresh, from the nod and a wink to bilingualism by including the English ‘The’, to the colour scheme and the flair and freedom of the handdrawn text. One of the notable achievements has been a measurable increase in engagement with internal communications and with a month on month increase in reach on social media (average of 16%). There’s a lot of positive feedback coming from staff and students about the new image and our designs and merch are much in demand. 

What’s the secret? Here’s some basic tips that we’ve taken away from the project:

A. Strategy & Tone

Reframed their comms with a modern yet respectful tone — balancing the school’s prestige with warmth and approachability and with a contemporary, vibrant touch that reflected the student body as much as the school itself.

Spoke directly to parents and students — with a mix of French-English bilingual content for inclusivity and reach. This bilingual aspect is the key to creating trust with the audience. Not all parents are fluent in French and The Lycée very much wanted to focus on its identity as a bilingual school with a thriving British section.

B. Content Plan

Shared community wins: student projects, alumni success, events. These posts are really popular and important in building up a community spirit.

Used visuals heavily — professional photography + short films with emotional storytelling. We wanted to move away from text heavy social media communication. Let the pictures tell the story.

Total reworking of the design and presentation of the newsletter to make it user friendly. We’ve got clear measures of success here, seeing a higher percentage of engagement with the newsletter. 

C. Engagement Tactics

Regular content calendar: 2–3 posts/week.

Story polls, student takeovers, and parent testimonials to drive shares. Bak ahs been working with students to empower them to make their own content and this is going to be an important legacy of the project.